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Sounding Off: Anything for a quiet life

All those home electronics essentials come weighed down with labels boasting of watts and dots, gigahertz and megabytes. But here is one essential fact you will never find plastered on the side: how many decibels they will pump out into your home, even when they are not in use.

Modern electronics are noisy — often horribly, invasively noisy — and there is scarcely a manufacturer who will come clean about how much audible pollution its hardware will churn out once you plug it in.

A quick check around the office uncovered a stack of stories about everyday electronics items that whirr and hiss all day and all night, often for no apparent reason. There is a Thomson PVR that emits an audible hum almost constantly. Someone else tried to use a miniature Shuttle computer as a video recorder, only to discover that it’s no fun having something by the television with a